The drug war, as most everyone knows has been going on a long time — decades! It’s just your standard government program. It keeps going and going no matter how much failure, death, and destruction it produces.
For example, when I returned to my hometown of Laredo, Texas, in 1975 to practice law, the drug war was going strong. In fact, my very first trial was in federal court. The federal judge appointed me to represent an indigent defendant in a drug conspiracy case. The DEA and the assistant U.S. Attorney were going after my client with a vengeance. But I was able to convince the jury that the charges were nothing more than a sophisticated set-up designed by the DEA. My very first trial in federal district court produced an acquittal.
In the 1970s, the DEA, the U.S. Attorneys, and federal judges were pulling out all the stops to win the drug war. That was some 50 years ago! Obviously, they failed to win the war on drugs because the drug war is still going strong. New generations of DEA agents, U.S. Attorneys, and federal judges are doing the same things they were doing back when I was practicing law on the border in the 1970s and 1980s.
Over those 50 years, there have been drug warriors who have exclaimed, “If we would just really crack down in the war on drugs, we could win it.” (They say the same thing in the war on immigrants, which has been going on at least as long as the war on drugs.)
But the fact is that the drug warriors have been cracking down in the drug war the entire time. For example, back in the 1970s, federal judges were meting out the longest jail sentences permitted by the law. They felt that they were doing their part to win the war on drugs. One federal judge in San Antonio, who was later assassinated, was even called “Maximum John” because his policy was to blindly impose the highest jail sentences he could.
Since not all federal judges saw themselves as drug-war enforcers, some of them declined to mete out the highest possible sentences. Thus, at the behest of the DEA, Congress enacted mandatory-minimum sentences, which took sentencing discretion out of the hands of these “weak” federal judges and required them to mete out high jail sentences in drug cases. Alas, more failure. Drug use, possession, importation, and distribution continued unabated.
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They then cracked down with asset-forfeiture laws. These laws enable drug-enforcement officers to steal money and other assets from people who they suspect are drug dealers. They don’t need probable cause to make the seizure or even a reasonable suspicion that a drug crime has been committed. In fact, drug-war officials never have to charge a person with a crime. The asset-forfeiture law empowers them to simply steal people’s money. If a person doesn’t like it, the law permits him to sue. But since most people who are targeted with stealing are poor, they don’t have the money to hire a lawyer. Even if they do have the money, it’s not worth it because the lawyer is going to charge as much or more than the amount of money that has been stolen. The drug warriors keep the loot.
Notwithstanding all this, proponents of the drug war exclaim, “Jacob, they are still not cracking down enough. If they really cracked down, we could finally — finally! — win the war on drugs.”
You know, as in just killing drug-war suspects on sight. That’s the ultimate crackdown that proponents of the drug war would love to see, even if they won’t admit it openly. If drug-war enforcement officers didn’t have to hassle with arrests, prosecutions, and trials and could just kill suspected drug-war violators on sight, there would be no more drug-law violations. Everyone would comply with the law so as not to get shot to death.
But there is one great big problem with that ultimate crackdown: It’s been tried … and it failed to win the war on drugs! Several years ago, the Philippine government implemented the ultimate drug-war crackdown. It was going to show all those weak-kneed drug warriors around the world, including those in the United States, how to win the war on drugs. It implemented a shoot-on-sight policy that empowered drug-war enforcers to kill suspected drug-law violators on sight. It is estimated that they killed some 6,000 people.
Did their ultimate drug war crackdown win the war on drugs? Well, not exactly. Just this month, the Philippine drug warriors made the biggest drug seizure in the nation’s drug-war history. Of course, they are celebrating the seizure as a great big victory in the war on drugs, especially since they didn’t kill anyone in the operation. They fail to see that it’s actually another great big failure, one that demonstrates that their ultimate drug-war crackdown didn’t succeed in winning the war on drugs.
As I have been maintaining for 34 years here at The Future of Freedom Foundation, there is only one solution to the drug war — end it. Legalize all drugs, just as America legalized booze. Yes, I realize that it would put the drug warriors out to pasture and that they would have to get real jobs in the private sector. But it also would put the illicit drug dealers out of business too, just as legalizing booze put the illicit booze producers out of business. Most important, ending the drug war would put America back on the road toward a free, healthy, and peaceful society.